Love Macs, hate smug Mac fanboys

Since joining Wired I’ve used a Mac every day instead of the PC I’m used to. This has been a generally pleasant experience as I’ve got my head around the differences between Windows and OS X.

Although OS X is easy to use, I sometimes had to turn to the internet for answers. On one occasion I wanted to know how to create a batch file that would write the time to a text file every minute. In Windows, I would create a text file, write in my commands then save the file with the .bat extension.

I didn’t even know what batch files were called in OS X, so I googled “OS X batch file equivalent”. This led me to a helpful-looking post titled “Equivalent of a PC batch file needed”, written by someone wanting a script to make a daily copy of a folder from one server to another. The first reply runs:

“Sadly, unlike Windoze, MacOS X only comes (built-in) with several (plus) scripting capabilities:Applescript, AppleScript Studio, Automator ('Tiger' 10.4.x), bash, csh, ksh, Perl, php, Python, Ruby, tcsh, tclsh, and zsh. To the best of my knowledge ...; and, I may have missed some others,” before pointing to some generic links about OS X scripting.

This is not helpful.

The author of the original post wanted some simple guidance, not a smug fanboy commentary about how great OS X is. A more helpful approach would have been to point out that there are several ways to script events in OS X, before recommending the best candidate for the job. The forum member could even go above and beyond the call of duty and put up a sample script.

This is not the only occasion where I’ve found the Mac community to be hostile. The Mitchell and Webb adverts were bad enough. Smugness is annoying. Stop it.

Edited by Holden Frith

Comments

macosxhints.com

Yes one can complain about the fan boys of the Mac world. But one could also complain about the functionalist Stalinists of the Windows world (all macs are is pretty and over-priced!) and the political zealots of the Free Software world (use proprietary software and you make baby penguins cry!)

The problem is really people who need to have others behave like them to feel that their own choices are valid or correct (they live in all three domains). All the talk of "X fanboys" is just using the language of these busybodies and simply spreading the cancer rather than treating it.

Boo boo

Jun 20th 2009

Boo Boo...That's another example of Mac fanboysim. In the PC world, it's rare to see anyone just randomly chime in about something Mac, when the topic is something entirely different. But in almost any discussion of the tiniest little thing with a Mac, there's a pretty good statistical probability that someone will comment about how whatever the mac does it beats windows. This is fueled by the Mac ads, which universally suck...but which Macheads think are true. That entire ad campaign has been the fuel for these flame wars....but the majority of Mac people see no harm in it. But I know from my experiences using Macs, that they crashed...and I mean almost constantly. and I'm talking to this day. My PCs have NEVER crashed.

Boo hiss

May 2nd 2010

I know, I tried to tell this one mac fan boy that I dislike macs but he simply repeated "I must have never used or owned one" but I, in all truth, had owned more macs than he ever had. He asked me what I did with them and I replied "I removed all of the mac hardware and only kept the chassis in which I placed PC hardware and ran modified debian so it looked like mac software (but runs much smoother) and 27 of my 30 macs I did this to were sold and the users loved them, why one might ask, it was because of the following:It may look like a mac and display like a mac but it has all of the functionality and power of an PCFYI: These were all laptops